Somebody Going to Emergency.

I think it’s only fair to start this entry with an issue which has put me on edge all day. Early this morning, I received an e-mail message from my parents containing only a link to a newspaper article. Thinking it was an article about this week’s box-office returns, I put off reading it for a few hours while I went about packing for the trip home. When I returned to my computer and clicked on the link, I was confronted with the following logline—

SKERRITSVILLE -- A family blowout degraded into what State Police called a "Dodge City" shotgun battle between two local brothers Sunday inside the home they shared.

As I read on, the reasons behind my mother’s hastily-sent message became clear: the Brothers Hatfield, whom I have known for half my life, had waged an unholy gun battle in their home and the woods around my parents’ retreat. While neither one was dead, they had managed to injure each other quite well, and they had been thrown into a rather large prison in Upstate New York. If they are convicted on all of the charges, and they most probably will be, each of the brothers could face ten years in Coxsackie Maximum. Ten years! Odds are that I’ve seen both of them for the last time.

Look, I’d be upset by this news no mater what, but it just seems a bit more poignant arriving right before I head back home. The ratio of shit moments to good ones this semester was rather high; at times I grew a bit more than despondent. September and October can pretty much be written off outright; nightmares and blackouts brought on by stress ruined those months. You know, I can even chart the lowest point of the semester: it would have to be the Friday of Halloween weekend, when a few local ruffians called me a faggot and pitched a Coke bottle at my head as I was walking to a party. Funny enough, that was the same night I met Hildy, and, well, she wrote about it in a more fluid and interesting manner than I could. Sometimes it takes very little to bounce back, and just the fact that I could still meet vital, impressionable people even after I’d pretty much given up the entire idea of humanity in the collegiate environment. . .well, that was something. I ran the rest of the semester attempting to find these occasional moments of levity and human connection, despite the constant nagging mystery illnesses and the obscene amount of work. In fact, it was starting to look like this year would end on a high note.

Leave it to the Brothers Hatfield to fuck everything up. Our Christmas plans are probably blown due to the fact that the house down the road is now a crime scene, and I’ll be forced to abandon any pre-New Year’s plans I had, because they figured into most of them. I guess I should have known not to count on anything; hey, if the prognosis of August had stood, I would be back in New York undergoing a fun regimen of whatever radioactive barrage my doctor could throw at me. It’s still a bit infuriating to think that everything has to be rearranged because a few dumbass friends of mine got their hands on shotguns. If the trend of the past month-and-change holds, this development will actually yield some wonderful events. Of course, I shouldn’t count on anything.